Author: Lorenzo Barbieri

By Lorenzo Barbieri, Gaetano Brando, Giuseppe Allocca, Fabio Balboni and Daniele Cifiello The Newcomb-Bedford law describes a very strange behavior for “natural” data distributions: looking at the first significant digit if that is not random but follows a logarithmic behavior. We have examined if the meteors mass index measured by RAMBo follows this law and what it means about our data. 1 Introduction Mathematics has sometimes extraordinary mysterious or difficult explanations that make it one of the most fascinating sciences. One of these is the Newcomb-Bedford’s law. The Newcomb-Bedford law, or Newcomb-Bedford distribution, also known as Benford‘s law or law of the first digit, examines numerical data collections from physical measurements. This law does not have an intuitive explanation and at a first glance seems to come rather from the esoteric world than from the statistics world. Let’s see what it is. 2 Newcomb-Bedford law If we extract the first significant digit in each number from a numerical data distribution, we will get a distribution of numbers ranging from 1 to 9. Table 1 shows an example. Table 1 – Example with a distribution of numbers. Number First significant digit 54 5 38 3 361 3 753 7 17 1 76 7 40 4 118 1 521 5 161 1 16749 1 51 5 13 1 74 7 One would expect from this distribution that the probability to find any of the possible significant first digits...

This year RAMBo has recorded a strong Ursid activity. In the attached graphics you can see that the maximum started at 270,800 of solar longitude. The first graph shows the mass behaviour, the second one (red) shows the Hourly Rate. More informations on our web site...

We can see two days of activity: the 13 and the 14 December. What is relevant is a twenty minute of “heavy bombing” at 262,950 of solar longitude, in which the HR remains low but the mass index increased a lot. This was just before the expected forecast of the 68 Geminids shower (610...

On Friday, September 23 at 13 UT the RAMBO system has revealead a weak evidence of the Kappa Leonids shower, who reached a double hourly rate in comparison to sporadic. The maximum occurred fifteen minutes after the forecast (at solar longitude 180.7). The amplitude and analysis of the echoes durations suggests meteoroids of low masses. RAMBo research Group Associazione Astrofili Bolognesi Web site: http://www.ramboms.com Mail: ...